Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

housekeeper at both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. Her mother had been Hindley’s nurse, and she seems to have attached herself to the Heights even as a child, before she had a regular place there. She goes to Thrushcross Grange with Catherine Earnshaw on her marriage, and is kept on by Heathcliff after he has acquired the property. She therefore is Lockwood’s housekeeper when he rents the house, and it is she who tells him the story of Heathcliff, Catherine, and the younger Catherine. She is a comfortable, homely body who only partly understands the significance of the terrible actions she is narrating. However, she tells us that she has educated herself through the library at the Grange, and her reflections, though sometimes platitudinous, can also sometimes surprise us by their acuteness, for example: “we must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering” (v. 1, ch. 10) – an odd judgment from one who seems to be a Christian; or “you’ll not want to hear my moralising, Mr. Lockwood: you’ll judge as well as I can, all these things; at least, you’ll think you will, and that’s the same” (v. 2, ch. 3). ... log in or subscribe to read full text